Brown Wins One-Party Tussles With California Democrats

Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- As California lawmakers rushed to
wrap up their work before going into recess until January,
Governor Jerry Brown was seen playing Wiffle Ball in the
courtyard of his office at the state capitol in Sacramento.

The governor had good reason to relax. He's scored
another victory in the legislative session that ended last week,
persuading Senate Democrats to go along with his plan to spend
$1 billion on prison beds to avoid the potential release of
thousands of felons under a federal court order.

Passage of his plan was one in a string of wins this year
during tussles with fellow Democrats who control both chambers
of the legislature. At age 72, he came to office in 2011 facing
almost crippling dysfunction in the state’s government, and
vowed to use his ripened acumen to rein it in.

“At this stage in his life, he’s learned just about every
trick in the books,” said John Pitney, who teaches politics at
Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.

Brown, now 75, is in his third term as governor. His
father, Pat, served two terms. Growing up in politics, Jerry
Brown has spent more than a quarter-century in elected
offices, including secretary of state, attorney general and
mayor of Oakland.

That experience and chairmanship of the state Democratic
Party have helped him cajole party members and strike
compromises when Democrats sought to raise spending or clashed
over how to overhaul school funding. In a year he’ll be up for
re-election, though he hasn’t declared his intentions yet.

Campaign Cash

A majority of voters approve of his job performance, 51
percent to 33 percent, according to a Field Poll in July. He’s
sitting on a $10 million mound of campaign cash, and Republican
contenders for his office have yet to gain traction. All of that
has allowed Brown to push his policy agenda mostly unfettered by
traditional politics.

“He’s not in a position where he needs to sign bills
because he is afraid of alienating his base or because he is
afraid of alienating campaign donors or because he is afraid of
losing votes to Republicans,” said Bill Whalen, a fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University, near Palo Alto,
California. “This gives him the luxury of picking and
choosing.”

Whalen describes Brown as politically complicated.

“He is not a rubber-stamp governor and he is not a
lockstep-liberal Democrat,” he said. “The legislature
understands that under Jerry Brown, when they send him a bill,
one of two things can happen, and one of them is not good.”

Budget Deficits

Brown began the year sparring with Democrats who wanted to
boost spending. Voters in November approved higher sales and
income taxes the governor sought to end persistent deficits that
added up to more than $100 billion since 2007.

Brown insisted on using conservative economic estimates,
saying growth would be curbed by higher federal payroll taxes
and automatic U.S. budget cuts, known as sequestration.
Democrats wanted to use a higher forecast to justify spending
about $2 billion more.

The governor prevailed, and in June lawmakers passed a
$96.3 billion budget, up less than 1 percent from the previous
year and giving the state a $1 billion rainy-day reserve.

Brown and Democrats scuffled again last month when he
proposed spending a third of that reserve this year to lease
cells at private prisons in and out of the state. California’s
prison system once locked up almost twice the number of
prisoners it was designed to hold. Federal judges have ordered
the state to cut the population to 137.5 percent of capacity.

Treatment Programs

Senate Democrats refused. They fought to spend $200 million
to reduce lawbreaking with more rehabilitation, drug and mental-health treatment programs, and to set up a commission to study
sentencing changes.

Brown struck a deal that got the plan he proposed, under
the condition that he seek a delay from the court and spend any
potential savings from such a postponement on programs to curb
repeat offenders.

“He didn’t try to steamroll legislators,” said Thad
Kousser, associate professor of politics at the University of
California San Diego. “He waited, he was patient, he brought
them to the table but he found allies in the legislature and won
the support of the rank-and-file and that pushed leaders to
agree with him.”

Brown also worked with Democrats to push through
legislation they sought, including a bill he said he’ll sign to
raise the state’s minimum wage 25 percent to $10 an hour. That
would be the highest in the nation in 2016 when it takes effect.

Undocumented Immigrants

Democrats also passed a bill, which Brown pledged to sign,
that will allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s
licenses, joining at least eight other states that now do so.

“I think we can accurately say that the governor has
success with his legislative agenda as has the legislature,”
said Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco and
chairman of the Budget and Fiscal Review Committee. “He gave
uncommonly clear signals that he was prepared to sign those
bills with some suggested amendments -- and so again, working
with the legislature on a couple of very important and high-profile issues, we had a couple of successes.”

Still, Brown bucked environmentalists, traditional allies
of Democrats, over a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing as the
state prepares for development of the largest shale-oil reserves
in the U.S.

Fracking Limits

The bill lawmakers sent him would for the first time
require permits to inject millions of gallons of chemically
treated water underground to free oil and natural-gas deposits.
Energy companies would also have to disclose the ingredients in
the chemicals.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, California League of
Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Environmental
Working Group, which sought more restrictions, said the bill was
too watered down and withdrew their support.

In the case of another traditional issue for Democrats, gun
control, Brown hasn’t said whether he’ll sign a package of bills
that grew out of the massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren last
year.

The measures would outlaw semiautomatic rifles with
detachable magazines, ban adapters to convert magazines to high-capacity clips, order safety certification to buy any gun and
require ownership records for all firearms.

While lawmakers and Brown were mostly in accord in the end,
there remain potential controversies that some Democrats are
looking to bring up when they return in January.

Health Benefits

Democratic lawmakers want to restore cuts in child-care,
adult day-care and the Medi-Cal health-care program, said Nancy
Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat who heads the Assembly budget
committee. There’s also interest in expanding state pre-kindergarten programs, she said.

Brown hasn’t signaled he’d agree to those items, she said,
noting that the governor even tried to block a modest increase
in spending to process a backlog of claims from disabled
veterans.

“I know the legislature -- both sides, the Assembly and
the Senate -- are going to address this,” Skinner said.
“That’s something we’re going to have to discuss.”